W&L's schedule is up. Season starts home for Wittenburg, at Gettysburg, at Salisbury. Roanoke has replaced Shenandoah in our final week game. I like this. W&L has always lacked their own ODAC rival in football. With H-SC and R-MC occupying each other, the other options just never fell into place. Shenandoah never covered the gap. But W&L does have a healthy rivalry with Roanoke and Lynchburg in a lot of sports, including soccer and lacrosse. So maybe this will grow into that type of game. Unless Lynchburg starts football and steals Roanoke....

What I think is really going to happen. 60-80 schools are going to break off from the NCAA. They are going to form 4 conferences of 15-20 and it's going to be developmental pro ball. These schools are going to play football, m&w basketball, and baseball, maybe softball or women's soccer thrown in.

The rest of the former D1, FCS and FBS, who all get "left behind", are going to rebrand as the "real" Division 1. They aren't going to want to give up the prestige of that title, and they will basically turn back the clock to pre-NIL days. It's going to look like the early 90s. Lower conference payouts, facilities will age, coaching contracts will be reasonable, along with staff size, and scholarships will be the big point. The big difference might be an FCS style playoff instead of the bowl games. They will hold most of the current NCAA sports, as it will be reasonable and useful to these sports to amortize facilities over many more student athletes.

D2 and D3 will remain mostly the same, though NIL will, eventually, disappear again. A few schools will move down from the "new" D1 as the money no longer is as sweet a temptation, but most will be fine.

The new "pro" league will continue to raid the new D1. In fact, I think the majority of their players will come from the new D1 in football. Less so in the other sports. But very few h.s. kids are going to make that jump in football. In accommodation, the new D1 will have majors/degrees that focus on athletics. That way they can prepare for the jump and they don't feel like the schooling is a waste.

There will be some jockeying for those 60-80 spots, though the major conferences pretty much have that sown up already. You might see a few schools like Memphis, who offered to pay their way in to the Big 12 and take no payout, try and desperate jump in, you might see a few schools get booted. I suspect they will do this by making schools put some skin in the game to get started, like a franchise fee. But basically, that's what you are going to have.

If these schools want to have other athletic programs, they will do it amongst themselves. I could see golf, tennis, t&f, etc., all sports with pro pathways, but not too many, and not among all schools. The only real hang up I see is the time frame of eligibility. Somehow it will need to be enforced. And the pay is going to have to be fixed. At some point NIL is going to have to actually mean something. The deep pocketed donors are not going to give the way they have been, recently, forever. It need to be sustainable. So I suspect it will start to work like a business. Players will get their own sponsorships, but pay will come from the school based on revenue.

Anyway, I give it a 5-10yr timeline, max, mainly due to tv contracts, with the only wildcard being Washington stepping in and doing something to stop it.

Yeah. I don't think there is a D3 soccer equivalent. Indiana is a byproduct of the massive shift in D1 athletics, especially football and basketball, and a fantastic coaching hire. The ingredients required for this kind of rags to riches shift, impossibly fast roster turnover, traditional power becoming irrelevant by dollars, and a coach that learned what Calipari struggled to learn... strong, proven men all over the playing surface are better than outstanding young talented boys.

But without the earthquake of changes to how FBS football works, it doesn't happen like this. I'm not saying Indiana couldn't have improved, I'm saying the lightning shift doesn't happen without the transfer portal, the importance of dollars, and a brilliant coach.

If FBS programs have any sense, the value for proven 20+ year old players should have just blown past the value for flashy 5 star incoming freshman. Honestly, the G5 has become AAA. They should be able to recruit better young players now, but they are going to get picked clean for any of them that actually develop after a year or two.

Quote from: Ron Boerger on January 16, 2026, 09:51:58 AM

Quote from: jknezek on January 16, 2026, 09:08:49 AMBloomberg's latest on the demographic challenges facing colleges, more than a few D3 schools are mentioned in various ways in this piece:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-college-enrollment-cliff/?embedded-checkout=true

Paywalled; assume you have access, could you provide a gift link which seems to be an option for subscribers (5 per month)?

Try this. It's a pain to get their web article based on how I use Bloomberg.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-college-enrollment-cliff/?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc2ODU3ODc5MiwiZXhwIjoxNzY5MTgzNTkyLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUOFlLVFZLR0NURlUwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJGQzA5OTZBRTdCNTk0RjgxQTlFQUM4Q0QyNTM1RjU5NyJ9.x2k8QomozgtpD4u514N4igqO5iUHIR3ZJdrUllCwtX4

Bloomberg's latest on the demographic challenges facing colleges, more than a few D3 schools are mentioned in various ways in this piece:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-college-enrollment-cliff/?embedded-checkout=true

Man the ODAC just can't hold on to members. I don't know what Gallaudet expected though. Winning a game was more than I expected from them, but Averett or Guilford gave them a chance every season to get a win or two. And yes, I'm aware Guilford absolutely pasted them this year, but let's be realistic about the program outside of 2012-2015.

Anyway, I don't see how this helps Gallaudet. Does it help the ODAC? I suppose it depends on who the teams can add OOC, but it definitely adds to schedule heartburn. RMC playing Gallaudet doesn't really do much but take up a weekend, but that's not much different from Averett or Guilford, and if you have to add Apprentice to fill the weekend, that's not helpful either.

With both Averett and Guilford in and out of money trouble, ODAC football has to be sweating bullets. Thank goodness for Roanoke, and here's hoping someone can convince Lynchburg to start football.

Quote from: Tigerfan on January 12, 2026, 01:30:37 PMYou ought to be. The Generals have some young talent (Amorosi, Newkirk, Breeden, Die and Ransom) and should be a top tier ODAC team soon, if not already. 

Except for last year they've been knocking on the door for a while. But the ODAC basketball door is a tough one to get through! Until last year (and ignoring COVID), six straight years of double digit conference wins. An ODAC tournament run or two. McHugh has been a difference maker for a program that was middling at best, miserable at worst, since the late 70s. Hutchinson got the ball rolling a bit, but McHugh has been strong.

Still big hurdles to get over though.

I feel good that W&L has recovered from last year!

The MLS Draft eligibility is really weird. Basically coaches and scouts vote on who they want in the draft.

So, yeah, I'd say their Academy programs have some interest or at least offered it to them.

Quote from: Ron Boerger on December 16, 2025, 12:25:25 PMAustin College named Dr. Rebecca Cantor, currently Provost and Chief Academic Officer at Spring Hill [AL] College, as their 17th president.  She will begin her term in July 2026; current president Steven O'Day will continue in the role until his retirement in May 2026.  Prior to her arrival at Spring Hill, Dr. Cantor was at Savannah School of Arts and Design, where she served as department chair, professor of English and Assistant Provost.  Dr. Cantor will also serve as Professor of English at Austin.

As she has never served at a school with a football program, it remains to be seen how her arrival will impact the 'Roo program, and 'Roo athletics in general. 

Springhill's athletics are very much a mixed bag. Women's Volleyball is pretty good, as are a couple other women's sports. The men's team sports aren't great. But nothing that would imply a lack of support, just nothing that implies the admin is going out of the way to prioritize them either.

My kid is doing middle-school wrestling this year for the first time. We are forced to use FloWrestling for every tournament. It's appallingly bad software with the least intuitive interface I've come across in a long time. For kicks and giggles, I signed up to be notified when my kid's ring was assigned and his match started. Tournament ended at 3 p.m. Saturday, after he wrestled 3x. I was never notified. 8 p.m. I was told he needed to report to his wring for his first match, the next one at 10:30 p.m., and the final was at 1 a.m. Sunday morning. None of these times were a simple 12 hours off either. It was just completely random.

None of the wrestling parents, who dealt with Flo before, have a single good word to say about it. The whole company is a steaming pile of garbage.

Well... W&L was doomed by what plagued them all year against good teams, an inability to put the ball in the net. They were consistent start to finish this year!

Good season boys. Congrats on the ODAC finals and tourney bid. Can't complain, they worked hard but were just a team with a killer flaw.

They don't care. They already have your money and it's all AI stuff cobbled together from the web.

Quote from: awadelewis on November 11, 2025, 09:23:29 PMThree years into Coach McCollum's tenure and no signs of improvement rubbed some people the wrong way.  A lot of us were expecting to see movement towards a 0.500 season this year.   Surprises me that our VC and AD were that quick at pulling the trigger, was not expecting the call to happen until after our last game this weekend.  I think we have talent on the field but it's difficult to overcome 50+ years of a lack of success on the field.

I mean, I get it. But Black got 3 years, Laurendine 5, Rundle 5, McCollum 3. Windham was the last one that was there for any amount of time, 10 years. I'm just surprised. At some point, Sewanee has to stop blaming the coaches. If they want a winning program, or at least not a losing one, they are going to have to do something on the admin side to support it. Other sports programs at Sewanee are quality programs. While football is always the outlier due to roster size, it still should be possible even in a conference with quality opponents like the SAA, to get to .500 at least some years.

This is a pattern. Three or four years, fire the coach. It's been going on for a while. Something else is the issue at this point. It can't just be the wrong coach over and over.